No more freebie lunch-hour window-shopping. No more gratis Gaslamp jaunts. No more Comic-Con coasting. Not even for the Batmobile.

As of Feb. 4, the Westfield Horton Plaza mall is no longer offering three hours of free parking with validation. According to the downtown shopping center’s new parking policy, those three hours will now cost you a minimum purchase of $10 from any of the mall’s stores. No purchase? That will be $8 an hour, with an evening flat rate of $20 after 9 p.m.

And in parking-entitled San Diego, it might as well be $200.

“I’m surprised. I didn’t even know they were doing this,” said Edwin Monclova, an engineer who had popped by Horton Plaza on Tuesday to pick up an iPhone charger. “I’ve been coming here for 16 years, and I’m like, ‘What is this?’ ”

From Padres games at Petco Park to movies at the Reading Cinemas Gaslamp 15, Horton Plaza’s garage has long been the go-to refuge for visitors seeking relief from downtown’s pricey pay lots, inconvenient valets and 12-minutes-for-a-quarter parking meters. The fact that many of these shopping-mall parkers had no intention of shopping at the mall is at least partially responsible for the harsh new Horton Plaza reality.

“We get a lot of visitors who go outside the mall and that’s fine,” said Ernest Villarreal, Ace Parking manager for the center. “But the validation was not intended for outside merchants, it was always intended for mall shoppers.”

This is not the first time Horton Plaza has charged for the privilege of stashing (and sometimes misplacing) your car in the bewildering maze of its fruit- and vegetable-themed garage. When the mall first opened in 1985, ﻿a minimum $7 purchase bought you a sticker good for 90 minutes of parking. If you wanted to stay another 90 minutes, you needed to make another $7 purchase.

Before the mall went with no-strings validation in 2007, three-hour parking was free with any purchase, from a Nordstrom splurge to a humble pack of CVS gum. No matter what the price, however, the thought of paying to park has always been as foreign to San Diegans as leaving the house with a coat. As in, why should we have to do that?

“When we moved from Pacific Beach to downtown, our customers said, ‘What about security and what about parking?’ ” said Bill Keller, co-owner of Le Travel Store, a Horton Plaza tenant from the time the mall opened until Keller moved the store to its current Fourth Avenue spot in 1994.

“We are spoiled here. We have a resistance to parking meters at the beach, and we have a whole bunch of areas where parking is totally locked up (because people don’t have to pay for it),” Keller said. “We have been a sprawling city that came of age in the era of cheap gasoline and lots of space for cars. I am happy to see that we are becoming more of a European city where we have a very lively downtown, but we are gaining density, and the ratio of parking spaces to people is going down.”